We live in an increasingly visual world where images constantly assert themselves. If we want to prepare children to communicate globally, make genuine connections, and avoid being misunderstood, a literacy curriculum must take account of children learning to be visually literate.
Kerry Assemakis (December 2024)
Kerry Assemakis is a Senior Lecturer in Primary English and is currently a doctoral student with an interest in visual literacies. She also has research interests in developing teachers’ identity and confidence as writers. Prior to joining St Mary’s University, Kerry was a teacher in primary schools, also working across the borough of Richmond supporting other practitioners with the teaching of English.
Why visual literacy?
Visual literacy is the ability to read and write using images and text (Farrar et al., 2024). Integrating visual literacy into the primary and secondary curriculum provides children and young people with the necessary skills and cultural knowledge to communicate in an increasingly visual world. In primary schools, visual literacy can be taught through picture books, an approach which also advances children’s critical and creative literacy skills. This blog will discuss the benefits of including visual literacy when children are learning to read and write.
Making meaning through words and pictures
Just as writers use literary devices to communicate meaning and draw their readers into a narrative, designers and illustrators use visual devices to create meaning and draw their viewers into pictures (Leigh, 2012). Children encounter both print and digital visual texts in a variety of multimodal forms, such as picture books, film, art, videogames, graphic novels, comics, social media content, posters, advertisements – the list could go on. Within these texts, meaning is created through the intentional use of colour, texture, shape, line and typography. It is important children are able to understand the visual techniques used and are able to analyse and discuss these techniques with others, using a metalanguage of visual literacy (Farrar et al, 2024). In particular, children learning to communicate in a global society need to understand how colour has political, religious, and emotional connotations. For example, in Western societies, red evokes feelings of danger, excitement, and romance, whilst in China, red symbolises luck and happiness. In India red can symbolise purity – many brides marry in red, but in many Western societies, it is white that symbolises purity, yet white is often associated with death and mourning in many Asian communities. For children to make genuine connections and avoid misunderstandings in their future global communications, an understanding of how colour is interpreted across cultures is vital.
Picture books are useful literary devices for children to begin to learn about visual literacy in print form because of how images and words work together in subtle and complex ways. Studies demonstrate that when primary aged children are provided the opportunity and time to explore the relationship between word and image, they develop narratives and characters in more complex ways (Leigh, 2012; CLPE, 2019; Farrar et al., 2024). Furthermore, exploring and crafting picture book spreads enables children to understand themselves and their world, and encourages innovation, creativity, and critical thinking skills (Rourke and Spehar, 2018).
Towards a global visual literacy curriculum
The benefits of children being visually literate are recognised by educationalists and policy makers across the globe. In Finland, for example, learning about the visual arts and the production of visual texts is a basic requirement from a young age, and teachers are encouraged to utilise art-based methods to promote multiliteracy, as well as develop children’s cultural competence and self-expression. In Australia, the literacy curriculum requires that children comprehend and compose texts using visual knowledge, alongside text knowledge, grammar knowledge and word knowledge. In the UK, in Scotland, the education curriculum places much importance on creativity, places expressive arts high on the agenda, and acknowledges the importance of a literacy curriculum that develops children’s knowledge and skills for 21st century engagement. The picture is similar in Wales whose literacy curriculum places value on the expressive arts as a vehicle for pupils learning to communicate through visual literacy and creative writing. The announcement of a curriculum review in England therefore offers the potential to reframe the traditional and dominant view of children learning to read and write through text only, to include children learning to being visually literate in a world characterised by global communication. Isn’t it time to consider how we, as educators, are preparing children to communicate in an increasingly visual world?
References
Centre for Literacy in Primary English. (2019) The Power of Pictures Summary of findings from the research on the CLPE Power of Pictures Project.
Farrar, J., Arizpe, E. and Lees, R., (2024) ‘Thinking and Learning through images: a review of research related to visual literacy, children’s reading and children’s literature’. Education 3-13, 52(7), pp.993-1005.
Leigh, N. (2012) ‘Writers Draw Visual Hooks: Children’s Inquiry into Writing’. Language Arts, 89(6), pp.396-404.
Rourke, A. and Spehar, B. (2018) Pedagogies for the Visual in Innovative Learning. Champaign, IL: Common Ground Research Networks.